Food Brands: Holiday Marketing Best Practices

If there’s one thing families know how to do over the holiday season, it’s share really wonderful meals together. For food marketers, it’s a huge opportunity to reach a wide audience looking to delight loved ones.

Whether you’re marketing food, recipe books, a restaurant or kitchen products, the entire industry will be uniting around foodies from Thanksgiving to Christmas. If you’re going to stand out amongst the holiday buzz, you’ll need to meet those foodies online.

According to the National Retail Federation (NRF), over half of respondents, 55%, plan to do their holiday shopping at least partially online—but it’s an extremely competitive game this time of year.

If your brand is going to stand out, you’re going to need data-driven insights when it comes to targeting and budgets. Most importantly, you’re going to need knockout creatives to entice consumers to click.

This holiday season, we’ve taken a deep dive into the planning and executing on digital marketing campaigns for the food industry.

Building the best food ads is a matter of movement and color.

From video ads to sponsored content, we see colorful images and videos of people performing best no matter the category.

For video campaigns, focus on specific actions, whereas for sponsored content and social media ads, colors and the lack of photo props are what’s important for performance.

Video campaigns: keep your subjects moving.

Physical activity drives the best performance from video branding campaigns. For food marketers, keep your subjects in your videos cooking for the most engagement.

We analyzed the top 2,000 video campaigns on the open web based on two key metrics—viewability and completion rate. We mapped actions in three categories to see where the highest opportunity for finance marketers is this holiday season: physical activity, vocal activity and general activity.